


Dawn Is A Feeling

by SherlockianWhovian



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Enchanted Forest (Once Upon a Time), Alternate Universe - Vampire, Angst with a Happy Ending, Captain Swan Halloweek 2019, Captain Swan Role Reversal 2019, F/M, Princess Emma Swan, Supernatural Elements, The Enchanted Forest (Once Upon a Time), Vampire Captain Hook | Killian Jones, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 18:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21183965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SherlockianWhovian/pseuds/SherlockianWhovian
Summary: Princess Emma has always heard tales whispered about the crumbling castle in the mountains and with adulthood comes independence, giving her the opportunity to discover the castle’s secrets once and for all. Will she find her end or perhaps her beginning?





	Dawn Is A Feeling

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Captain Swan Role Reversal and CS Halloweek 2019 on Tumblr. Inspired by art from darkcolinodonorgasm. With much thanks to Caitlin (awkwardnessandbaseball) for her encouragement!

There had always been rumours about the crumbling castle in the mountains, tales told in whispers between children at the fireside on All Hallows’ Eve, but Princess Emma of Misthaven never believed there to be any truth in them. No monstrous beast or child-eating witch would truly be allowed to remain unchecked in the towering fortress in her kingdom -- her parents would have seen to it already, of that she was certain.

She felt no fear as she made her way across the stone bridge towards the imposing building, stepping over cracked and missing flagstones as her scarlet cloak billowed in the breeze behind her. As heir to the throne and with the newfound freedom of adulthood, she’d decided to take time to explore every inch of her kingdom and first on her list was the mysterious castle from the ghoulish tales of her childhood. She may not believe the rumours to hold any truth, but there was no harm in investigating.

The ornate wooden entrance doors may once have been elegant and imposing, but now they were tired and forgotten. The paint on the wood was chipped and peeling, while the black metal detailing had long since rusted. Decades of thick cobwebs filled the corners of the doorframe, hiding them from view completely, although the spiders seemed to have departed some time ago.

She took hold of the handle and gave it a shove, placing her shoulder against the wood and putting more weight behind the attempt when she felt a slight bit of movement. Slowly, reluctantly and with a dreadful groan of complaint, the door opened wide enough for her to slide through the gap.

A momentary wave of warmth rushed over her as she stepped into the entrance hall but she didn’t give it a moment of thought, too distracted as she was by the faded portraits on the walls and dust-covered fixtures and fittings. For an abandoned building, it was full of far more personal effects than she’d expected. Whose home had this been and what had happened to make them leave?

She made her way through the lower floor briskly, keen to progress to the higher floors and discover all of the castle’s secrets before she’d be forced to retreat before sundown. She may be a Princess, but even she knew better than to be alone in the forest after dark.

There was nothing out of the ordinary on the ground floor, room after room of dining tables and chairs, musty armchairs and sofas with the occasional writing desk covered in so much dust it was hard to tell the original wood types or colours of anything. She ignored a staircase down to the dark subterranean levels, choosing instead to head upstairs where she could see glimpses of sunlight through haggard drapes.

She soon found that a seemingly endless amount of bedrooms and sitting rooms filled the upper floors, with two studies, an observatory, a painter’s studio and a music room being the only discoveries of real interest. A part of her was rapidly becoming disappointed, did this old castle have nothing special to share? 

Finally, when it felt as though her exploration of the building had been a waste of time, she came across the spiral staircase that led up the largest tower. The staircases to the smaller towers were protected by locked doors, but the heavy door protecting this set of stairs opened with barely a creak. She stood on the first step hesitantly, looking up at the sprawling staircase and back at the door she’d left open behind her. She’d never liked being in places with only one exit, especially not a place where there was no help on hand, but how could she turn away and leave this building behind without exploring the tower?

She nodded to herself and pushed on, moving slowly and carefully up the spiral staircase. She didn’t want to rush and risk tripping and falling or missing a cracked or loose step. If the castle hadn’t been lived in for as long as it seemed, who knew how structurally sound the tower was? She forced her worried thoughts away with each step that she took, thinking only of reaching the top of the tower and the warm bath that awaited her at the palace when she returned home that evening.

The room at the top of the tower turned out to be a library, with curved bookshelves lining the walls and stretching up towards the vaulted ceiling. Sets of ladders were dotted around, some closed and tucked away while others were open and had books piled atop them as though their owner had only just stepped away. She’d be convinced that they had, if the pages weren’t as thick with dust as everything else in the crumbling building.

Drapes covered the windows, but moths had clearly gotten to them and left behind gaping holes in the fabric, allowing sunlight to light certain areas of the room. From standing in the well lit areas, she could make out more piles of books and other pieces of furniture dotted around in the dark.

She had to move out of the light completely to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkest part of the room, where the drapes were mostly intact and the bookshelves were heavy with ancient tomes. There was a grand chair, almost throne-like with its solid limbs, embedded jewels and high back, and sat atop it appeared to be a statue of a man.

It was so lifelike that she’d felt her heart beat a little faster when she’d laid eyes on it, but every inch of it was clearly made from smooth white marble, with no colour used whatsoever. It was a shame, she thought as she leaned in to examine the features a little more closely, some use of colour would have made it into a true masterpiece. The clothes chiselled into its form were outdated, as was to be expected, but they suited it perfectly.

She frowned when she noticed something out of place on the statue. Where there should just be carved lips, there was something more on the marble, two imperfections that didn’t fit at all. She reached up, cupping the marble and placing the pad of her thumb against the strange addition. Was it... a fang? Who had commissioned a statue of a vampire to sit at the top of the tower?

“Ouch!” she gasped with a wince, pulling her thumb back when the tip of one of the fangs sliced into her thumb. She hadn’t expected it to be so sharp as the rest of the marble was perfectly smooth, but it had dug in deep enough to draw blood.

She looked back up at the statue, her eyes widening when the droplet of her blood on the fang was absorbed into the stone. Could marble absorb liquid? Wouldn’t it just roll off? The more she looked, the more changes she suddenly noticed - the stone seemed to be changing colour and becoming more life like. She took a few steps back, her bloodied thumb forgotten as she stared at the statue that was rapidly transforming into a real man before her eyes.

-

_“One day your desires are going to get you in trouble, brother.” Lord Liam Jones chuckled as he watched his younger brother pen yet another sonnet with his quill and parchment on the writing desk in the study overlooking the landscaped gardens, “Who is the lucky lady this time?”_

_“You make me sound as though I spend all of my time chasing women.” Lieutenant Killian Jones murmured in response, his eyes flicking over the lines of damp ink, “Being on land long enough to find a lady worthy of a sonnet is rare for me.”_

_“So this will be how you spend your shore leave?” Liam rolled his eyes, putting his newspaper aside and getting to his feet, “There are more important pursuits than womanizing. We could go hunting or you could finally show an interest in the family business. I’ve told you time and time again that there’s a desk waiting for you in the office, why not come with me and start to learn the business while you’re here?”_

_“Leave is for resting, isn’t it? Going down to the docks and surrounding myself with the shipping fleet would hardly be resting. The Navy offers me much better prospects than our firm anyway, not to mention the fact that you’ve got it more than covered. I’d hate to step on your toes, my Lord.”_

_“You know I hate it when you use my title against me. It was hardly my choice to inherit it.”_

_“You could have turned it down.”_

_“I could have.” Liam agreed, moving to the window and looking out over the lawn and hedges, “But why turn down the one thing Father chose to give me? You know what he was like, he’d have traded us both away for a row boat if necessary. This is our home, turning down the title would have put that at risk.”_

_“You make him sound like such a tyrant.” Killian chuckled, putting down the quill and carefully using the blotter to absorb the excess ink from the surface of the parchment, “We meant something to him, he just had a strange way of showing it.”_

_“Mother loved us, he tolerated us. Once she was gone, there was no reason for him to show us any care so he didn’t.”_

_The Lieutenant got to his feet and came to stand beside his brother at the window, “Have you considered that we reminded him of her? Perhaps he found that too painful to deal with? He continued to provide for us by working hard on the company, we never wanted for anything, so we were hardly abandoned.”_

_“My sweet, innocent brother.” Liam sighed, putting his arm around the younger man, “We’ll have to agree to disagree, as always.”_

_Killian nodded, patting his brother’s back before he moved back to the desk, rummaging in the drawers for a crisp envelope._

_“Who is she?” Liam asked with a sigh, stepping over to the desk and glancing over the words on the parchment, “You’ve written an impressive little love poem here, you’re becoming quite the poet.”_

_“It’s rude to snoop.”_

_“Won’t you tell me her name at least?”_

_“Fine.” Killian muttered, carefully folding the paper and slipping it into the envelope, sealing it with a dab of wax, “Her name is Milah.” _

_“Milah?” Liam repeated with a frown, “Milah, as in the Admiral’s wife?”_

_"Aye."_

_"You're playing with fire, Killian. You know that he's not a man to cross."_

_"She's worth it."_

_"You'd better be sure of that or you could lose everything."_

_Just a few short weeks later, Lieutenant Killian Jones’ world began to fall apart when his beloved brother was killed in an accident at the docks, leaving him the sole heir of the Jones family and the new Lord of the estate. In his grief, Milah became his tether and set a series of events in motion that would lead to his own final undoing._

-

“Vampire!” Emma accused with both fear and amazement at her discovery. She watched the former statue get to his feet, his coal black eyes focusing on her as her voice rang out through the room. He studied her, his body shaking as he licked his lips when he took in her scent. Despite his apparent dehydration, she couldn’t deny that he appealed to her. She shook her head in disgust at her own thoughts, how could she find a monster with fangs attractive?

“Human.” he greeted in a hoarse voice, looking around the room and taking in the dust and disintegration of the drapes, “How long has it been?”

“Wait, did someone turn you into a statue?” she asked, taking another few steps back as he began to examine the timeworn items around him.

“Not exactly.”

“But you were like stone until I-”

“Until your blood hit my skin and brought me out of hibernation.” he explained, flicking through a book and propping it open, “I was researching my own condition when I discovered that not drinking blood for a long enough time would allow me to escape my suffering whilst ensuring everyone around me would be safe from me. Here, you can see for yourself if you like.”

“If that’s the case then shouldn’t you be… really thirsty?”

“Aye, and I am.” he replied, turning to face her once more.

She took one more look at the black in his eyes, the fangs peeking out at her and his visible strain to control himself before she took off out of the room. She didn’t look back as she took the spiral staircase two steps at a time, forcing herself to move as fast as she could despite her skirts that desperately tried to get in her way.

“Please… Let me explain…” he called after her, his voice much closer than it should have been while she tried to put distance between them. She refused to look back or respond, focusing only on the steps of the main staircase as she rapidly descended towards the grand entrance doors with her cloak billowing behind her.

“I don’t mean to hurt you! I have a supply of blood in the kitchens… or at least I did before I slept.” he tried again and she glimpsed him standing at the top of the stairs, somehow impossibly close behind her without showing any sign of strain.

“How did you get there so fast?” she huffed, sprinting the short distance across the marble-floored hall and practically throwing herself at the ajar door. 

“This is my home, there are over one hundred secret passages and I know each and every one of them.” he answered with a chuckle.

She felt the same wave of warmth roll over her again as she reached the doorway, pausing and turning back to face him when she sensed him no longer pursuing her.

“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you coming after me?” she demanded with a frown, “You’ve followed me this far, what’s to stop you from grabbing me in the woods?”

“I can’t leave.” he sighed, a sad expression on his thin face as he stood at the foot of the main staircase, “It’s part of the curse that made me into this monster, I can never leave this castle.”

-

_“What’s wrong? Lost your favourite toy?” the biting voice of the Admiral cut through Lieutenant Jones’ grief stricken thoughts, replacing detachment with pure rage._

_“It was you, wasn’t it?” he accused, getting up from the bench overlooking the harbour and turning to face the other man. Milah, the woman he’d been in love with and Admiral Gold’s wife, had turned up dead that morning, “You killed her!”_

_“What did you really expect?” Gold sneered, a twisted smile on his face, “That I’d let you two waltz off into the sunset? There’s a reason I’m an Admiral and you’re a Lieutenant, I can see the bigger picture and clearly you can’t, dearie. I knew what you were doing, I’ve known for some time but when I heard whispers of her leaving me for you… I had no option but to intervene.”_

_“You’re a murderer! You’re not fit for your rank! I’ll have you investigated and they’ll rip your career from you, just like you ripped her life away!”_

_“Report me if you wish but there won’t be a drop of blood found on my hands. Instead, if they were to truly look into the matter with the detail you’d no doubt request, then perhaps they’d find a bloodied shirt hidden aboard your ship somewhere… It is the Jewel of the Realm that you’re currently serving on, isn’t it? It would be a shame if a promising Lieutenant was found guilty of murder, wouldn’t it?”_

_“You really are a snake, it’s no wonder that she wanted to escape you so badly.”_

_“Snake?” Gold repeated with a chuckle, “I prefer crocodile. If you even attempt to make any move against me, you’ll feel the sharp tip of each and every one of my teeth as I take apart your life piece by piece. That castle of yours? Gone. The gold bars in your safe? Stolen and melted down. You’ll be a snivelling wretch in the gutter and I still won’t be content that you’ve suffered.”_

_“If there’s anyone who should suffer, it’s you. I made Milah happy, you just made her depressed! She told me all about how cowardly you were, not even carrying out your own dirty work and it’s even true with her death. You wanted her gone and you weren’t enough of a man to do it yourself.”_

_“You think you’re a man, dearie? You’re nothing but a lost boy, forced to steal what doesn’t belong to you. She never would have chosen you, I hope you know that. What have you got to offer her?”_

_“Love.”_

_“You have much to learn, Lieutenant Jones. Love holds no value when compared with something of actual worth like gold.” the Admiral smirked and turned away, apparently done with the conversation._

_“I’ll be watching and waiting for you to make a mistake, Admiral. This isn’t over and you haven’t won.”_

_Gold turned back, “You’re right, I’m not done with you yet. Pain, loneliness and suffering is all that lies ahead for you, I’ll ensure it.”_


End file.
